To write a cultural essay, start from one specific thing you have seen, heard or used (a film, an exhibition, an advert, a building, a food), describe it precisely, then argue what it reveals about the people who made it and the people who consume it. The form is short on rules and long on evidence: a single clear claim, details only you noticed, a sentence or two of context, and an honest answer to the strongest objection. The best way to learn it is to read the essays that defined it, from Montaigne to Roland Barthes and Susan Sontag, and copy their methods rather than their style.
The cultural essay at a glance
- Anchor: one object or event, small enough to describe in detail. Barthes wrote a whole essay on a car.
- Claim: one sentence saying what the anchor means, not whether it is good.
- Evidence: quotation, close description, dates, prices, names, things a reader can check.
- Context: just enough history to show what the work was answering.
- Voice: first person is allowed, as long as your experience explains the object rather than replacing it.
- Length: anything from a short magazine piece to a book. The Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize asks for proposals for essays of over 25,000 words.
- Test before you send: can a stranger repeat your argument after one reading?
What a cultural essay is, and where the form comes from
The word itself is a clue. “Essay” comes from the French verb essayer, “to try” or “to attempt”, and Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592) was the first author to call his work essays, meaning attempts to put his thoughts into writing, as the encyclopaedia entry on the essay as a form records. His Essais, first published in 1580 and revised until about 1592, run to three books and 107 chapters, and their stated aim was to record “some traits of my character and of my humours”. In English, Francis Bacon’s essays of 1597 were the first works to describe themselves as essays.
A cultural essay is an attempt in exactly that sense. It differs from a review, which tells readers whether to buy a ticket, and from an academic paper, which surveys the literature before it makes a modest claim. The cultural essayist takes something ordinary enough that readers already have a view of it and tries out an interpretation in public.
The modern version owes a great deal to post-war Britain. Raymond Williams, born in 1921 in Pandy, Monmouthshire, the son of a railway worker, wrote an essay in 1958 that opens at a bus stop outside Hereford Cathedral, after a visit to the Mappa Mundi, and then states its thesis plainly: “Culture is ordinary; that is the first fact”. Six years later, in 1964, Richard Hoggart and Stuart Hall founded the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham, which treated youth subcultures, television and advertising as serious subjects until the university closed its successor department in 2002. Williams later published Keywords (1976), short essays on 110 words such as “culture”, “status” and “work”, which is still a useful model of how much one small object can carry.
Choose an anchor you can describe in detail
The commonest failure is a topic that is really a field. “British art since 2000” is a syllabus. “Why every new block of flats in my town has the same grey cladding” is an essay.
Look at how the classic writers chose. Roland Barthes’s Mythologies, published in 1957, collects 53 short pieces written between 1954 and 1956, most of them first printed in the review Les Lettres nouvelles. Their subjects include professional wrestling, soap powders, the face of Greta Garbo, steak and chips, food photography in Elle and the new Citroën DS 19. Each is a thing a French reader of the 1950s could picture instantly, and each becomes a way into how a society tells itself stories.
Three practical tests help you pick:
- Have you met it in person? Something you saw last week gives you details nobody else has. A press release does not.
- Can you describe it in a paragraph without adjectives of praise? If all you can say is “stunning”, you have a reaction, not an anchor.
- Does it puzzle you? The best subjects contain a contradiction: an old building now loved by the people who once wanted it demolished, a protest song used to sell cars.
Turn the anchor into an argument
Write your claim in one sentence before you draft. It should name the object, the angle and what follows from it. “This exhibition is fascinating” fails. “This museum’s decision to hang the colonial portraits next to their sitters’ account books changes the paintings from status symbols into receipts” works, because a reader could disagree with it.
John Berger’s Ways of Seeing, broadcast on BBC Two in January 1972 and made with producer Mike Dibb, is a good model of a claim built step by step. The first programme drew on Walter Benjamin’s 1935 essay on mechanical reproduction to argue that copies cut Old Master paintings off from their original setting; the fourth argued that colour photography in advertising had taken over the job oil paint once did. Each episode makes one argument and spends its time on evidence.
Then find the strongest objection and answer it in the text. If you argue that a television drama romanticises poverty, say that its writers and many viewers see it as realism, quote them fairly, then show the scene that tips the balance your way. An essay that ignores the obvious counter-argument reads as naive, even when its claim is right.
Gather evidence a reader can check
Description is the cultural essayist’s main evidence, so make it exact. Count things. Note the wall text word for word. Write down the time on the clock in the scene, the price on the menu, the year on the foundation stone. A single precise detail (“the lighting drops to one spotlight on the fourth line of the speech”) persuades more than a paragraph about “atmosphere”.
Context is the second kind of evidence, and it should be brief. Two sentences on when and why the work was made usually do the job. Check every date, title and name against a primary source: the gallery’s own page, the broadcaster’s archive, the publisher’s catalogue. Factual slips damage a cultural essay more than a review because your whole argument rests on noticing what others missed.
Quotation is the third. Quote short, quote exactly and give the source. When you quote a critic you disagree with, choose their best line, not their weakest.
Use your own experience as a lens
The personal voice is one of the form’s strengths, and the best-known example shows how to use it. James Baldwin’s title essay in Notes of a Native Son (1955), his first book of non-fiction, recounts his father’s death and funeral, which fell on Baldwin’s 19th birthday and on the same day as the Harlem riot of 1943. The family story is never decoration: it is how the essay reaches its subject, race and inheritance in America.
That is the test for any anecdote of yours. Does it help the reader understand the object better? Your first visit to a seaside town can explain what its new gallery means to people who live there. A paragraph on your commute probably cannot.
Susan Sontag took the opposite route in “Notes on ‘Camp'”, first published in Partisan Review in 1964 and her first contribution to that journal. It is built from 58 numbered notes, dedicated to Oscar Wilde and interspersed with his epigrams, and the author’s life barely appears. Both approaches work. What they share is that every sentence serves the argument.
Draft, structure and revise
Cultural essays do not need a fixed template, but readers must always know where they are. A shape that works for most first attempts:
- Opening scene: the anchor, described concretely, as Williams starts at his bus stop.
- Claim: stated within the first few paragraphs.
- Context: a short passage on when, who and why.
- Two or three movements of argument: each built on a different piece of evidence.
- Objection and reply.
- Ending: what the reader should now see differently, ideally returning to the opening image.
Sontag’s numbered notes and Barthes’s short chapters show that fragments can work too, provided the order builds.
For revision, George Orwell’s six rules in “Politics and the English Language” (1946) remain the most practical checklist in English. They include “Never use a long word where a short one will do” and “If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out”, and the last one tells you to break any of them “sooner than say anything outright barbarous”. In “Why I Write”, published the same summer in the magazine Gangrel, he names four motives for writing prose: sheer egoism, aesthetic enthusiasm, historical impulse and political purpose. Ask which one is driving your draft, because the answer often explains why a paragraph feels off.
A final revision pass:
- Read the essay aloud and mark every sentence where you stumble.
- Delete the first paragraph and see whether the second is the real opening.
- Check each paragraph against the claim. If it does not support it, cut it or change the claim.
- Verify every fact again in a source you can link to.
- Ask one reader to tell you your argument in a sentence. If they cannot, the essay is not finished.
Where to read more and where to take the essay next
Read the models above in full: Montaigne for freedom, Barthes for close looking at everyday things, Berger for argument built from images, Baldwin for personal experience used with discipline, Sontag for structure. Williams’s “Culture is Ordinary” is reprinted in Resources of Hope and, in part, online.
When you have a longer project, prizes for essayists give you a deadline and a reader. The Fitzcarraldo Editions/Mahler & LeWitt Studios Essay Prize is open to unpublished writers living in Great Britain and Ireland. It awards £4,000 and up to six weeks’ residency in Spoleto, Italy, for a proposal of no more than 5,000 words for a book-length essay. The 2026 round closed on 16 March 2026, was won by Gabriel Rolfe, and its rules disqualify entries found to be AI-generated (checked October 2026). Check the page for the next deadline before you plan around it. For writing with a political edge, the Orwell Prizes publish their criteria and past winners, which make a useful reading list in themselves.
For more on criticism and the arts in the UK, see Creativity’s UK.
Frequently asked questions
How is a cultural essay different from a review?
A review judges a work for a reader deciding whether to see it. A cultural essay interprets the work, or an everyday object, to say something about the society around it. Many essays contain judgements, but the judgement is not the point.
Can I write a cultural essay in the first person?
Yes. Baldwin and Williams both open with their own lives. Keep personal material only where it helps the reader understand the subject.
How long should a cultural essay be?
As long as the argument needs. Check the word count a publication asks for before you start; at the other extreme, book-length essays can exceed 25,000 words, the minimum the Fitzcarraldo prize sets for the finished book.
Do I need academic theory?
No. Theory can sharpen an argument, but Barthes’s wrestling essay and Orwell’s rules show that close description and plain language carry most of the weight.
Photo: Nic McPhee, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
